Jules Crittenden makes a great point about the latest Iraq poll which finds 48 percent of Americans think the war is going well. But, 54 percent want the troops to come home:
Count me in that 54 percent. I want the troops to come home, too. After we win these wars. After their tours as part of the ongoing US-Iraqi strategic alliance are up. Much as troops come home every day from Germany, Japan and Korea. Who are these people who don’t want soldiers to be able to come home anyway?”
I think we’ll be seeing a lot of troops coming home starting next year. Does that put me in Cindy Sheehan’s camp?
My childhood computer didn’t make this list. Spent a lot of hours on that comptuer. A lot of hours.
Here’s a blog from a University of Georgia professor that keeps up with how sex is used in advertising. Pretty interesting.
Great political ad from Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris. Here are more Chuck Norris facts.
Three years ago, Australia’s prime minister won re-election. The headline and lede from the New York Times read:
Australians Re-elect Howard as Prime Minister
Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, who went into the country’s election with a good-luck message from
President Bush, was decisively re-elected Saturday, according to official returns.
Today, the prime minister lost:
Bush Ally Defeated in Australia
Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, one of President Bush’s staunchest allies in Asia, suffered a comprehensive defeat at the hands of the electorate on Saturday, as his Liberal Party-led coalition lost its majority in Parliament.
Siding with Bush is only important if you lose an election.
And in 2004, the New York Times made sure (in the third paragraph) that we all understood Howard’s re-election had nothing to do with support for the war in Iraq:
Iraq loomed in the background during the campaign, but Australian political analysts cautioned that the voting was not a referendum on the war. The main issue was the economy, and that is booming.
But in the third paragraph today’s article, the the Times goes ahead and connects the dots for its readers:
Mr. Howard’s defeat, after 11 years in power, follows that of Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, who also backed the United States-led invasion of Iraq, and political setbacks for Tony Blair of Britain.
So, when Howard won, it had nothing to do with Iraq. When he lost, it was the same Iraq war backlash felt by other world leaders who sided with Bush.
The New York Times is still awaiting the election results of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder.
“As God as my witness, I thought Turkey’s could fly.”
Happy Thanksgiving weekend!
The early seasons of “Sesame Street” have been released on DVD. According to Virginia Herrernan in the NY Times, the show stands in stark contrast to today’s saccharine fare:
The he show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.
Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.
The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.
Film critic Kurt Loder points out what’s wrong with De Palma’s “Redacted”:
The movie’s implication is that such horrific incidents are not unusual, but that they’re covered up by the military and the craven mainstream media. This is possible, of course. But the contention is unpersuasive in this particular case, since all five of the soldiers involved were arrested and charged, and three have been tried and sentenced to 90, 100 and 110 years in prison — information the movie declines to convey. The alleged ringleader of the group, Pfc. Steven D. Green, was discharged from the Army before the crime was reported by another soldier three months after it happened; Green will be tried in a federal court in Kentucky, and prosecutors are reportedly seeking the death penalty. (Green is a high school dropout with a record of drug and alcohol problems that was disregarded by the Army when he enlisted; he had already been identified as having “homicidal ideations” while serving in Iraq, and he was discharged after 16 months because of an “antisocial personality disorder.” The Army’s alarmingly lax recruiting standards are an important issue, but De Palma — convinced that it’s the unjust war itself that turns young soldiers into monsters, not the problems they bring with them to the battle — doesn’t address it.)
